


All The Queens of Antiva

by Scuffin_MacGuffin



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Dragon Age Kink Meme, F/F, Necrophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-09
Updated: 2014-03-09
Packaged: 2018-01-15 02:38:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1288147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scuffin_MacGuffin/pseuds/Scuffin_MacGuffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You called her lethallan, you called her elder sister, you counted every grin and you measured the depths of those butter-leather boots and you ached for the lengths of the legs in them, and she'd never understood.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	All The Queens of Antiva

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/6614.html?thread=22140118#t22140118) on the Dragon Age Kink Meme and edited a bit more since then. I have a lot of feelings about the character of Merrill and her complexity and her weaknesses and her strengths, and I am really proud of what I managed to turn all those feelings into with this story. However, it's certainly a very graphic piece of writing, containing necrophilia and descriptions of gore, so please only read if you feel that you're able.

+

Your bones tell you it is time for winter. Once you lived in the north, near cities with names like Nessum, and Caimen Brea, and it was so warm and you were so small you never knew you never knew what snow was. The hunters went to the _shem_ cities to trade because the _shems_ never thought to come to the hills, and the Minanter was only many fingers of water kneading their way through the uneven ground, intricate and senseless as the age-made whorls of the _vallaslin_ on an elder's face. You escaped your _mamae_ and climbed a tree and saw out over the Silent Plains _(Souveran,_ your people agree: a tired place), saw the grey and the heat and the sky-so-big and thought, _Here is the whole world._ But then they took you away to Ferelden and the rhythm of the seasons settled under your skin and filled you until it felt like home, and when you grew up the memory of the heat blowing off the wide grey plains didn't grow with you.

You think, _It is a Keeper's place to remember._

You think, _I am not a Keeper, and it would have been easier if I'd known that from the start._

You think, _If she were a demon she would be kissing me back._

The air is hot and slack around you, mist rising from the leafy forest that crowds the edges of the plateau, painting the horizon in dun-colored haze. There is no breeze to nudge away the humidity. By your map you know that hours to the north is the ocean, and a day east from there is a city that has never seen snow, one with a port, and tall sailing ships, and people of all sorts to fill it. Isabela would wink at the ones she recognized and roll her eyes at the ones she owed money to, and the rest she would cheat out of their coin. She would sleep with some and slip her knives into others and her smirk would be full of teeth. Isabela smirking and saying _Now_ this _is the way to a man's heart,_ the words full and liquid and rolling in her sky-wide mouth. Isabela, who draped you both in costume jewelry and said _Look kitten, we're all the queens of Antiva!_ Isabela sighing, _Yes, but ancient history just isn't any fun,_ never bothering to understand. Isabela, whose mouth is hot and slack against yours, empty as the air. You pull back, just to see, and there is no art in that unhinged jaw, no smirk twisting the corner of those drying lips, and you think, _It shouldn't be so hot, back at home it's winter--_

Maybe, hours ago, before you arrived, there was a breeze, and maybe when she died she was tasting the ocean.

You try again, but the only thing you taste in her mouth is the echo of your own hot breath. And you know this isn't a dream because if she were a demon she would be kissing you back.

She is a body, and only that. Cumbersome in death as she never was in life. She never needed another’s skin, lived in her own so well, inhabited it sometimes like it was a toy and sometimes like it was a weapon and always like it was completely her own. Not like you (your elbows with their clumsy bend, a vase skittering off the table, your stark ugly ribs, your knees), no, and not like -- not like this, not with grit in sick shades of grey and yellow streaking her bright hair; not with cheeks pale and lips thin, all the blood gone out of them; not with body bunched and bent where arms and legs and muscle had snagged against the terrain as you dragged her away from the road where the Qunari had caught up with her, killed her, thought _Useless thing,_ and then left. Their own dead and Isabela alike splayed out on the ground: the woman who could fall down in a ditch and make it look like she'd done it on purpose tossed uselessly, awkwardly across the dirt, the edges of her slit throat flapping raggedly at the sky.

Maybe she had done it herself, with three dead around her but more coming all the time. Maybe she'd said _No, curse it, I won't go,_ and then her blade had kissed her own throat. Maybe she'd fought so well, with her knives and her courage and her quick dark eyes, that they'd had no choice but to kill her. Maybe she had been eager, brash, unafraid, when they'd come, all the laughter gasping out of her. Maybe this is all just a terrible dream.

No. Because she would be kissing you back.

You look up, you look away, and the distance yawns. The dry earth above the treetops and the treetops beyond the earth, miles and miles to see. The flat road cutting through the flat space, a dull little blotch of a town glimmering on the horizon, marking the way to the city, marking the way to the sea. A cloud of dust shudders to life: a caravan maybe, judging by the size of it, merchants and a few hired guards, heading south, south through the Silent Plains (the _Souveran),_ south through Nevarra, to where the weather acts like its supposed to, maybe west to Orlais, maybe east to the Free Marches, maybe setting up a little stall in Hightown selling lace and feathers and gilt amulets as big as your fist, and Isabela saying _This stuff is shit for idiot nobles, come on, I know this amazing place in Lowtown. I'll take care of you kitten, you'll see._

Soon they'll find the Qunari lying in the road, taken down by knives flashing like coins flipped into the sea, for luck, always, for the simplest thing that people know how to want. The merchants will wonder who killed the Qunari, and if there are more, and they'll clutch at their baubles and the hired guards will wipe their sweat on their sleeves. But they'll never find out. This secret, you'll hold it close. This is yours to tell, yours to grieve, yours to love and love. You called her _lethellan,_ you called her elder sister, you counted every grin and you measured the depths of those butter-leather boots and you ached for the lengths of the legs in them, and she'd never understood.

But then, you never merited the understanding. Fool girl, _da’asha,_ how could you? All you have built is another place to hide. All you have planted are the bodies of your own kin, Dalish on the mountainside and mages in the Gallows, graves too many, graves enough for none. All you have pieced together: a little life hidden in a little house with neighbors who never cared enough about you to accuse you of being wrong, your feet kept bare in anticipation of sweet-bladed grass, no matter how you said you were never going home again. A shattered mirror with a thousand edges, your own blood as the glue. And then she'd said _Kitten,_ and she was your grass, and your sky, and all the sweet color in them. But all you have built is a guilt-bright tomb in the desert, and all you have abandoned is too far behind you now. And _this--_

Is solace--

The only one, and it tastes like it's been out in the sun for too long. You sit back to watch the shadows of distant dun-tinted clouds twist across her face, her still chest, lending back the dark cast to her skin that death drained away with pale fingers. Your own fingers are tangled up in the curtain of her hair, the inky spread of it across the sun-beat ground, the octopus-curls round as an open mouth. You twist and you touch and you find what vitality, what bounce is left, and your other hand cradles hers. A kiss to the palm. A kiss to the arm, dark, feather-soft hairs skimming your lips; a kiss to the crease of the elbow where you can still taste damp, still smell sweat. The something that _was,_ that used to be, evaporating so quickly now, and you lap it with relish before it goes. Another kiss, and another, to the shoulder, along the flat line of the breastbone, the throat, dirtied, ragged, and you bite your tongue until it bleeds against the slit. A spark of magic that calls and consumes so eagerly following from your mouth to her body: a kiss of corruption, rather than life, but you can hardly help it now.

Fumbling and shaking, you unclasp her golden collar, sticky with grit and the leavings of a fountain of blood. You push it up higher to rest just below her chin, hiding the cut. Already she twitches a little with your magic. Almost, now, you can pretend. You can pretend that she never leaned up on her elbows from a mite-chewed tavern mattress all those years ago, pushing you away, blowing the hair out of her eyes and laughing, oh laughing, and you can pretend that the sadness in it hadn’t squeezed your chest. You can pretend that she never said _No kitten, you don't want that;_ you can pretend that she never said _You have a good heart, and you deserve better._ Years ago, miles and miles ago, a smoky night made smokier by a haze of alcohol, your tongue made clumsier, too clumsy to find the words to refute her, too clumsy not to have kissed her in the first place, nothing at all for your trouble except a fleeting brush of lips that never ever could have been enough.

You can pretend that it was for you, for your lips, for your clumsy kiss, that she’d come back. Not for that man, not for Hawke. You can pretend he never gave her away again. No grey hands dragging her spitting out of the throne room. You can pretend you never let him. _Let_ him, for his twisting shackles of loyalty, for his aid, the fleeting promise of past glories reflected in cut glass. It wasn’t until you felt the ash of mages you helped annul sift powdery between your toes, until you were killing with a staff already crusted with the blood of your clansmen, that you realized she’d been right to tell you no. Creators, you have never been worth her. Pretending does not make the knowledge roil through your gut with any less truth.

Isabela always preferred honesty.

Isabela is dead.

Do you keep pretending? Here is her bodice, stiff with blood, dried brown as her skin, brown as the leaves that decay forgotten under layers of fallen snow back in Ferelden, thousands of miles away, countless lives behind you. Here is your knife, sheathed ever by your wrist, here it parts the crusted laces, here and here her breasts heave out and roll to resting above her ribcage. Here is her nipple, drawing your eye, deep and sweet and brown, round as a copper bit and tasting like one too, that sticky-metal red-taste. No matter how you lap at it, it never hardens under your tongue.

There are places where it is impossible to peel cloth away from skin. You try to call to the blood, feed your power into it to make it loosen its grip, because just once, _Elgarn'nan,_ just _once_ you would like to see the all of her, all the parts she never showed you, slipping away and leaving only smokescreens black and thick with oil behind her, leaving always the threat of a gilt-handled knife. But the blood is dry and dead, and there is no power there for you or anyone else to find. No Fade-potential glimmering sickly between sliding shades of red. No dream, no dream.

Oh, but there is no deal you would not make.

You leave her shirt hanging open, pulled half around her arms, crusted impossibly to her sides, and make your way down her body. Palm her breasts, her taut stomach, her thighs. Dip your tongue into that hollow curl of a belly button, seal your mouth around it, and _suck._ Tug her underthings away from her. You leave trails of fresh blood with your bitten tongue, little rivers of your own life to cover up her lifelessness, little eddies of power, little pathways of magic to make the meat of her thigh shiver under your hand, to make her gut heave the way you always imagined it would, with laughter or with pleasure or with your name an inhaled breath sliding down her throat, an exhaled gasp between her lips. It is difficult to concentrate in this place so far from home, the dirt so scalding your knees, the sun high and hot and the sky grey behind it. But if you could only for a moment--

You rest your forehead on her waist, breathe her in (the slope of her skin, the scent sloping along her skin). You close your eyes and you _want_ and you feel yourself wanting and you grasp at her sure limbs, her stiffening jaw, you _touch_ her finally -- and there is no discernible difference between power and desire anymore; these are all things that flow through your veins, course through them, things that heat your cheeks and numb the tips of your fingers, things pumping helplessly through your heart, again and again, circling back and back, circling around the same question, the same empty answer. Things that have been condemned. _Maleficar_ and _monster,_ and if they could see you now -- could see _her_ now -- _no._ This is yours, and yours alone.

This is a love song. This is a prayer.

A prayer, and you flood her with power, you tug on her limbs, you soften the rigid coil of her spine.

A prayer, and you fill her lungs, you empty them, you listen, _listen_ to the sound.

Oh, a savored, savored prayer, and you make her thighs spread wide for you, around you, such a slight twiggy thing between them, smooth and white and wishing so badly to melt into her deeper textures, dark hairs curling ever-darker as they rush up her calves, light and whisper-soft just above her scabbed knees, a black forest creeping thick in the crease where her legs flow into her body.

If there is anything left in you that is capable of reverence, then it is hers, should have been hers from the start. Your hand is trailing softly down her front, your knuckle is dipping into her navel, is dragging down further, is parting her dark hair, is tracing her slit. You bid her bloom for you, and she blooms, purple and soft and secret, and there is something of her left there, to taste, to love, something not yet stolen away by the endless sun, more worth to it than to any quick shard of glass. You feel the flush of it all through your body, and your bones protest it is time for winter but acquiesce to the heat all the same.

You fumble off your belt, fumble your tunic up above your waist -- what a silly picture you must make, but it doesn’t matter. Your Gods are sealed away from the world, and there are no eyes left to judge you, no travelers who could see you from the road. None to seek you out under this small dull dome of sky, to watch as you straddle one thick thigh, her dark hairs meeting you, hairless, tickling your opening in a way so devilish that for a moment it makes you gasp, and think -- but when you check, her eyes are still dull and flat, like a mirror that you would not let yourself see was always immune to fixing.

Still not a dream, then. Still -- no -- a prayer instead, and after you've curled your bloody tongue around your fingers they slip inside her easily enough, and she is still warm there. Not wet, dry and chafing, but you arch your back and lap at her until she is dripping so much with your spit and your blood that the difference does not matter. You are dripping too, all down her thigh, you are lurching back and forth against her, feeling the meat of her parting the seam of your lips, making you want, and so you brace one forearm against her stomach and reach back to curl two fingers into yourself, to tease your own clit even as your nose and your teeth and your tongue bloody hers.

It is enough and it is not enough, you are pretending and you are not, you are screaming, you are tugging on the reins and making her scream, you are jerking her body forward and back, as if she wants you, as if she loves you, parodying life while grieving death, your tears mixing in with the spit and the blood, your teeth furious and chewing straight through her softest pieces. Gasping into her patch of oily hair, overwhelmed by her scent, by your grief, by the endless miles you've both traveled, overwhelmed into sensation, into the exalt of release.

You come back down and see the stiff angle of her neck, her vacant and complacent gaze.

You come back down the tears in your eyes are no longer worth ignoring.

This is defeat, and it tastes like sliding sticky up her body; it tastes like kissing her one last time.

And if she were a demon, she would be kissing you back.

If she were Isabela--

No.

All you had left was a prayer, and all you have now is its echo. You bow your head, and listen. Your bones groan under the sun.

+


End file.
